JG Melon: it is what it is, which is great

Took our son last Friday for a late lunch. We ordered 2 rare burgers and cottage fries. The burgers came out in 3 minutes flat! And they were fantastic. Many times rare burgers fall apart as you eat them, not this one. It stayed intact from first to last bite. Delicious. The cottage fries had zero salt and tasted a little flat.

In and out pretty quickly; still a top burger to eat if you're on the Upper East Side.

2019 Restaurant Wish List

A little space to notate the new restaurants I hope to visit this year and a few that I feel deserve a second look.

New to me in 2019? Hopefully:

1. Adda - seems everyone's raving/gushing about the lamb and food's fieriness.
2. Bamonte - One of my favorite 2018 experiences was taking the kids to Queen. Such honest food and such a welcoming environment. I'm hoping/expecting the same here.
3. Berber Street Food - both read reviews reminded me that I'm ignorant about so much of northwestern Africa. Beyond bistella and djoloff rice, there's a lot more for me to learn.
4. Casa Enrique - More new-to-me Mexican dishes please. 
5. Frenchette - Does anyone not like this place? And the wine list is only natural?
6. Le Coq Rico - A $140 baeckoffe? Sign me up!
7. Loring Place - I'm a sucker for a grandma pie and two decades ago I worked for the chef here.
8. Lowerline - I get too little of the gumbo, jambalaya, red beans dishes. 
9. M. Wells Steakhouse - So many years, every year I'm going to go and well, I don't go! I need a 9pm flight from LGA to incent me to eat here at 6:30!
10. Mu Ramen - my ramen intake has waned as I make more and more ramen at home. 
11. Okonomi - Also so many years of saying I'll go and not going. They even serve weekday breakfast!
12. Randazzo's - see #2
13. Tama - Filipino food gets too little of a place in our home rotation. I need to experience more to make sure
14. Zyara - Sandwiches of all sorts can be great but something vegan and Arabic? Sign me up!

Places to visit again

1. Chez Ma Tante - we had a lovely meal here in the summer of 2018 that included two wines I wish I recalled; because they were delicious.
2. Faun - a random 2019 partial family outing led us here where we experienced really delayed service and incomprehensibly good pork
3. J.G. Melon - it's been 20 years!
4. LIC Market - after two 2018 visits, this may be my favorite new restaurant in New York. I've even started replicating their dishes at home.
5. Ugly Baby - the food was delicious on a record-cold December 2017 night when I went with a self-purported foodie who then turned a nose up at offal and non-primal cuts. The cold and company made concentrating on the food difficult.

Dirt Candy

So I didn't have to go it alone. My favorite client was in town and able to set aside the time for an 8-course meal there. No need to go into detail aside from everything is vegetable and everything is innovative and thought-provoking. Nearly everything is delicious. My favorites may have been the desserts which included a Japanese eggplant foster! Some things were a little too cute; like the mini robata grill with peppers grilling over binchotan. Clever yet with little impact on the peppers (which were delicious on their own). Long live Dirt Candy.

Atla

Consistency in concept. As a few weeks pass since my lunchtime visit, that phrase best describes Atla. It feels like a casual offshoot of Cosmé. And I actively disliked it as much as I dislike Cosmé. Now, nothing is wrong with the food. I didn’t get sick. The service is fine. Nobody insulted me. The space is airy and clean. It all feels like a television set. Like at any moment a series of Haddad trucks could double-park on Lafayette and break down Atla in 2 hours. Future passerbys would ask did it really even happen? Did I even eat at Atla? And if you did, the food quality would not be the reason you’d remember it. On my visit I had the ranchero eggs with avocado. It was fine except not aligned with the service. I asked the waitress to help me select a dish (something spicy and not messy; note: I was in a suit). She struggled so mightily that I selected the ranchero to put her out of the misery I induced. What a messy dish. Large pieces of torn of tortilla covered in a nice sauce held two poached eggs. Stale tortillas don’t cut easily. The eggs will make the sauce messier. I asked myself how am I going to eat this mess? I tried and succeeded in staying clean though after 50% I stopped trying. It wasn’t worth the potential risk. I ordered an agua fresca to accompany my lunch. The drink is served in lovely glassware with a dozen small ice cubes (perfect cubes). Each time I lifted the drink to my mouth, the ice cubes came tumbling towards me. And this agua fresca was purple! What a potential mess. I asked for a straw and the check, finished my beverage, paid the bill and wondered: did that really happen?

Hao Noodles and Tea by Madam Zhu

First thing to know; do not visit their Web site (link though it'll load for minutes). But do visit this restaurant. The restaurant is airy, delicately decorated and though new, feels nicely worn in. The menu is fun to read (tip of the hat to "Make Winter Great Again") and all dishes are delicious.

One Saturday late last month, our family went for lunch. Every dish was recognizable to us. And each dish was better than we've had elsewhere. The lion's head meatballs were more delicate and flavorful than I've had before. The soup dumplings had incredibly thin skins, the most lightly flavorful broth, with high-quality pork. Spicy chic pea noodle soup (豌杂面) was unlike anything I've tasted. It had that ma la Sichuan flavor with a sort of Tuscan homeliness. Even the fried rice was excellent; each component separately fried to 90% completion before all being combined quickly My favorite dish was the spicy marinated pork trotters. When you order this dish in a Chinatown restaurant, the pork comes on in a gelatinous mess with non-uniform pieces and no real taste of the dry-fried chilies. This is a wholly different experience. SoS felt assaulted by the minuscule portion. I thought it was not filling but still a great value for that quality.

That's not to say Hao Noodles and Tea doesn't have it's problems. Or rather singular problem: service. The five of us were seated like the path a knight takes on a chessboard. It was the most awkward seating we've ever had. Our amicable server didn't know much about the food and even less about the teas. Tea is in the restaurant's name and the two wait staff I inquired with just re-read the descriptions.

If you're in a group of six with an interest in really exceptional Chinese food, family-style, I'd highly recommend Hao Noodles and Tea. Just like Pete Wells.

Wildair

Friday night brought me to Wildair with one of my favorite people in the world: Mister Editor. Wildair is a lot of fun. Mr. Editor and I drink similarly and so this was bound to be a great evening. The highlight of Wildair is the wine and trusting Jorge to bring out great wines. We had three wines (a bottle and then two glasses) that were all really interesting, very different from each other and wholly unique from anything I can recall (and we drink well thanks to Greg at Vanderbilt Wine Merchants).

We ate:

1. Bread (with olive oil) - bread was fine but the olive oil was pretty ethereal.
2. Half dozen oysters - fine
3. Half dozen clams with XO sauce and some sort of chive - intensely great: salinity, spice, sour.
4. Persimmon, stracciatella, and greens - excellent combination for a salad
5. Boneless skate wing with arugula - not very interesting, yet flawless execution
6. Beef tartare - excellent, perfectly chopped and seasoned.

Anyone interested in great wine would enjoy coming to Wildair.

Paowalla

Last week, Chef and I got out for a mid-week meal at Paowalla. (You may remember Chef from here.) Paowalla is the latest and hopefully long-term committed place for Chef Floyd Cardoz (disclosure: I cooked for Chef Cardoz for 5 months in 2002 as an unpaid externship.). First, Paowalla is not Tabla. The experience here is much more akin to Delaware and Hudson than the big Danny Meyer establishments of yesteryear. Paowalla has the tightly fitted tables in a low-ceiling dining room full of windows looking out onto Sullivan Street. Chef and I struggled to recall the restaurant that occupied this space prior. We settled on it being a semi-generic Italian restaurant from a generation or two ago.

Overall, I really enjoyed the food at Paowalla. I look for restaurants to inspire me to make better food at home and prepare dishes I won't attempt myself (e.g., mole poblano, vindaloo, Beijing duck). What did we have:

Chutneys

• Tomato Kalonji
• Spiciy Chili
• Mint Cilantro

The tomato kalonji easily stood out as the most interesting and enjoyable. I think the tomatoes were late summer heirloom tomatoes that the kitchen broiled and then made into a chutney, finally canning it for use throughout the year. Bright. Flavorful. Summer.

Breads

• Sourdough Naan
• Garlic Naan
• Tingmo

The two naan were fine. Better than a takeout shop, maybe similar to the ones I make at home (via Meera Sodha's recipe). The tingmo was a revelation. I had never had or even heard of tingmo prior. This was fantastic. It was similar to a Chinese man-tao but wrapped up with a flavor paste layered throughout. I felt sad when we finished the tingmo.

Small Plates

• Shishito Pakoras
• Burrata
• Boodie's chicken liver

The burrata was outstanding and completely unexpected. You have a dish like this and remember the transportive qualities of inventive food with flawless execution. There were moments eating this dish (with the tingmo) that I must have been nodding as Chef spoke, but I wasn't listening at all. I thought the pakoras were disappointing because they felt room temperature or cool by the time we ate them. Pakoras - to be great - sort of need to be their own course.

Large Plates

Baby pig vindaloo was complex and interesting. For me, it was a little too cheffy. The pig was a perfectly braised massive cube of pork belly that had the skin crisped to order and came in the vindaloo. Anyhow that ever orders out for vindaloo needs to come to Paowalla and try it. You get the vinegar, heat, caramel notes from stewed tomatoes. There are a lot of flavors going on.

Desserts

(Note: I did NOT want dessert but Chef did and that made all the difference) Saffron Yogurt Srikand. I grew up with srikand served at parties and weddings. Universally it was terrible. This was something wholly different. The yogurt was strained thoroughly. And it was good yogurt! I feel like the pastry team may have added gelatin or a potato starch slurry to give it just enough panna cotta giggle to make these amazing fried sweet noodles stand up.

We had a delicious inspiring meal in a lovely setting with satisfactory service.